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      Democratic senator sounds alarm on party’s failures: ‘We don’t act as a team’

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      A Democratic senator has sounded the alarm about her own party’s failings, urging colleagues to “slaughter some sacred cows” if they want to combat Donald Trump and win back power.Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan castigated fellow Democrats for losing their “alpha energy” and “bravado”, being “scared” to enforce immigration rules, taking an “elitist” approach to the climate crisis and having “a bias towards navel gazing”. She painted a bleak picture of a leaderless party pulling in different directions.“Democrats are very disparate,” Slotkin told an audience at the Center for American Progress thinktank in Washington DC. “We’re like a solar system with no sun. We got a lot of planets, some with their own gravitational pull, we’ve got a lot of stars but there’s not enough cohering us.”The senator added: “You can’t retake the town of Mosul without a plan but then also a coordination effort by all parties to specialise and do things. Everyone has a different role to play … My concern is that we don’t act as a team and, when we don’t work as a team, we turn our guns on each other and it’s so, so, so fruitless.”Slotkin, a former CIA analyst who served three tours in Iraq, is a first-term senator widely regarded as a rising star in the party. In March, she delivered the Democrats’ rebuttal to Trump’s joint congressional address.The 48-year-old used her speech on Thursday to unveil an “economic war plan”, proposing that the government addresses problems such as rising costs and declining trust in institutions rather than exacerbating them.The plan focuses on five areas: creating well-paying jobs, modernising education to prepare for future economies, making housing affordable through increased construction, pursuing an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy to lower costs, and reforming a broken healthcare system by introducing a public option and tackling drug pricing.“As a CIA officer and Pentagon official by training, I believe that the single, greatest security threat to the United States is not coming from abroad,” she said. “It’s the shrinking middle class here at home.”When people cannot provide for their children as they themselves were provided for, she argued, it breeds “anger and suspicion among Americans”. This frustration can be unifying for Democrats including “moderates, progressives and everything in between”.Slotkin argued that government failed to uphold its “Great American Deal” by not ruthlessly expanding the middle class, instead being swayed by special interests and political expediency. She proposed rebuilding systems around jobs, education, housing, energy and healthcare rather than simply “nibbling at the margins”.She also advocated for political reforms, such as banning corporate political action committee donations and congressional stock trading, to regain public trust and refocus politicians on the needs of the middle class.The senator urged Democrats to take a pragmatic approach willing to “slaughter some sacred cows” to achieve results. She called on her colleagues to distinguish between small businesses and multinational corporations and avoid “vilifying success”.Slotkin, who hails from a border state, said there must be acknowledgment that the immigration system is broken. “Both parties have been a mess on this issue. Republicans say border security should substitute for an immigration policy and are rounding up people in a way that goes against American values.“Democrats are scared to impose real rules. So let me slaughter another sacred cow. We need to move past the talking point on comprehensive immigration reform … We need big, bold change to fix a broken system but at this point that can be one bill or spread across five bills. I will work with any adults I can find who are actually interested in making some kind of progress on immigration.”On education, Slotkin called for mobile phones to be banned from every K-12 classroom in the US and advocated for investment in certification programmes, community colleges, trade schools and apprenticeships as well as a radical overhaul of federal workforce training programmes.“Killing another sacred cow: in America you don’t have to go to college to be successful … Making a living using your hands is a worthy path. Some Democrats give that lip service but it’s time to put our money where our mouth is.”She called for an “all-of-the-above energy plan”, including natural gas, nuclear, batteries, renewables and new technologies, rejecting the “elitist” climate change approaches of some fellow Democrats that create “purity tests”.Slotkin represents swing state Michigan, which Democrat Kamala Harris narrowly lost to Trump in last year’s presidential election. She was speaking two days after the progressive candidate Zohran Mamdani stunned the Democratic establishment by beating the moderate Andrew Cuomo in the New York City mayoral primary.Asked for her reaction, Slotkin replied: “The message that came across loud and clear to me was number one, people just like in November are still really focused on costs and the economy and their own kitchen table math. And they’re looking for a new generation of leadership. Those were to me the two big takeaways.“That’s why, again, it reinforces for me we may disagree on some key issues but understanding that people are concerned about their family budget – that is a unifying thing for our coalition. The message, at least for me, was clear.”She rejected the common observation that Trump supporters were voting against their own interests. “Their interest was in believing that someone was going to do something different and, while I don’t believe Donald Trump for one second on what he’s been selling, he at least was offering something different, and we need to hear that.” More

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      Mamdani stood firm in his support of Gaza. The Democratic party could learn from him | Yousef Munayyer

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      As the ballots were counted on Wednesday in the Democratic primary election for mayor in New York City, a young candidate with little national name recognition, Zohran Mamdani, stood atop a slate of candidates including the runner-up, and favorite, Andrew Cuomo. There are several reasons why Mamdani was able to pull off this remarkable victory, putting him on track to compete favorably in the mayoral election in November, and many of them have implications for elections outside New York City.But one area where the contrast between the candidates could not be clearer was on the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Mamdani, for his part, stood with protesters, demanded the release of Mahmoud Khalil, and called out Israel’s war crimes. Mamdani even pledged he’d have the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, an indicted war criminal, arrested if he came to New York City while he was mayor. Cuomo, on the other hand, volunteered to be part of Netanyahu’s legal defense team before the international criminal court.Israel’s genocide in Gaza has tanked already waning support for Israel in the US, particularly among Democrats. Polls show that for the first time, fewer than 50% of Americans have a favorable view of Israel. And while there is some movement among Republicans in this direction, the biggest driver of this trend is among independents and, especially, Democrats. Democrats sympathize with Palestinians over Israelis by a 3-to-1 margin. That is a massive gap and it also speaks to one of the most important ways a candidate’s politics on Gaza affects the way they are perceived by the electorate.Democrats increasingly feel their party leaders are old and out of touch with where Democratic voters are. About 62% of Democrats say their party needs new leaders. Few issues highlight how out of touch with their party leaders are than the issue of Palestine. While opinion polls are clear and consistent about Democratic voters’ disgust with Israeli policies toward Palestinians, Democratic party leaders like Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are stalwart defenders of Israel. Increasingly, a candidate’s politics on Gaza is a litmus test for authenticity and whether the candidate actually cares to represent the voters. Cuomo was not interested in representing voters on this issue, he was content instead to accept major contributions from billionaire backers of Donald Trump and Israel like Bill Ackman.Cuomo was the favorite in this race precisely because he had the name recognition and came from a New York political dynasty. His father, Mario, was the governor of New York for three terms from 1983 to 1994 and Andrew was governor himself for a decade before resigning in disgrace in 2021 after numerous credible sexual assault allegations. If you were of voting age in New York, you associated the name Cuomo with political office.Cuomo probably thought that name recognition alone was enough to overcome any votes he’d lose from people who were angered by his disastrous decisions during the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic or his sexual assault scandals as governor. This showed the total lack of effort in his campaign which seemed more geared for coronation than contestation. He failed to raise enough individual contributions to gain public matching funds and relied instead on big-money donors to fill his coffers through Pac contributions.Mamdani’s campaign was, almost in every possible way, the inverse of Cuomo’s. While Cuomo relied on billionaire backing, Mamdani raised the highest number of small-dollar contributions. While Cuomo’s campaign was barely noticeable in the streets of New York, Mamdani’s campaign knocked on one million doors. While Cuomo’s campaign message was muted and muddled, Mamdani’s was clear, bold and consistent.Mamdani’s projected primary election victory in New York also proved once again that voters will come out and vote in large numbers for candidates that they believe in even if their politics are characterized as well left of center. The conventional wisdom after Trump’s victory in 2024, especially in New York, was that the electorate had shifted right. But that was never the case, mostly this was due to disaffected Democrats staying home because they were tired of what they saw as the same washed-up, inauthentic politics.Anyone can run for office financed by billionaire backers while spouting talking points produced by expensive consultants. But what Mamdani, Bernie Sanders and, yes, Trump figured out is that there is a huge and growing swath of the American electorate so disaffected by empty and corrupt politics that they are hungry for someone who feels authentic.Mamdani’s apparent victory is just the latest proof that for Democrats especially, if there is ever any doubt about a candidate’s authenticity, their politics on Palestine will be an easy way to separate the real ones from those just trying to fake it til they make it. More

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      The Donald laps it up as Nato leaders compete to shower him with sycophancy | John Crace

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      Sometimes it pays to be a narcissist. To bend reality to your own worldview. To live almost entirely in the present. Where contradicting yourself is not a problem because two opposing statements can both be true. On the way to Nato you can question article 5. On the way back you can give all the other Nato leaders a patronising pat on the head. And everyone is grateful for it.There again it also helps if you are the most powerful man in the world. Donald Trump is not just tolerated, he is actively indulged. Prime ministers from other countries go out of their way to compete with one another in outright sycophancy. Flattery that started off as contrived now sounds dangerously sincere. Almost as if they genuinely believe it. Thank you Agent Orange for all you have done. We don’t know where we would be without you.And The Donald just laps it up. Feeds on it. At the recent Nato summit he looked like a pig in shit. Living his best life. Whatever sunbed regime he’s on, it’s working for him. If he lost any sleep over his decision to bomb Iran’s nuclear facilities, it doesn’t show. Just repeat after Donald: The mission was a complete and utter success and Iran’s programme has been put back decades. If the Pentagon says otherwise, it’s just fake news. Yet again, reality can be what you want it to be.Even when Trump temporarily loses it, he wins. Swearing is generally a no-no for any leader. A sign that you’ve lost control. But when Donald said Israel and Iran didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, he came out of it smelling of roses. Praised for his authenticity. Applauded for saying what the rest of the world is thinking. The Donald can do no wrong. He looks relaxed. God stand up for narcissists.Keir Starmer is no narcissist. And breathe a sigh of relief for that. The UK tried the narcissist route with Boris Johnson and that didn’t end well. Maybe we just aren’t a powerful enough country to get away with a sociopath in charge. Or, heaven forbid, maybe it was a matter of timing. Boris was the right man at the wrong time. That’s a horrible thought. Most of us would quite happily settle for a period of fairly boring politics. Where the government is serving the country rather than the ego of the person in charge. Where even when they are getting things wrong, they are at least trying to do the right thing.But that level of decency comes with a cost. Your psyche does not reward itself with a free pass. You worry about the consequences of your actions. Your toadying to The Donald. You worry about the people dying in Ukraine, Gaza, Israel and Iran. You worry when your domestic policies look like they are falling apart. Wish you had spent more time reassuring backbenchers. Had explained better the trade-offs you were making. Had not been so quick to take a quick cash-saving win by removing benefits from people who can’t wash themselves before going to work.Keir has tried to keep a lid on all this as leaders always do. Pretend that he’s fully in charge of the situation. That everything is going according to plan. But always the tell-tale signs leak out. Starmer’s eyes betray him. They have a deadness to them, the life squeezed out. His face pasty and pallid. A man desperate for a breather, a moment to relax away from the treadmill.Yet always there is one thing more. Another summit, another speech, another bilat, another crisis at home. This wasn’t how he imagined his first year in Downing Street. The pressure and the pace is relentless. The treadmill going ever faster and there’s no getting off. He aches in the places where he used to play.Just hours after returning from The Hague, Keir was giving a keynote speech to the British Chambers of Commerce. It was one that he and they will quickly forget. A routine, box-ticking affair. An annual date, along with the CBI, in any prime minister’s diary. It wasn’t meant to be this way, mind. Starmer knows better than anyone that Labour has to work twice as hard to show that it is the party of business. But this time he couldn’t fake it to make it. He’s no visionary. He can’t access people’s hearts. Only their reason. And that only intermittently.Keir began by thanking the BCC for all it had done for the country. He knew it had been a tough year and he had asked a lot of business, but the good times were round the corner. Possibly. There was the new infrastructure strategy. Now there was also a new trade strategy which sounded very much like the old one. Which was to keep on doing the trade deals we can, as with the partial deals with the EU, US and India, and try to do some new smaller deals with other nations. The applause from the audience was barely audible. They didn’t sound desperately impressed. They can tell when a speaker is out on his feet and is phoning it in.Just over an hour later and Starmer was in the Commons for a statement on the G7 and Nato summits. Here he was much more like his chipper self. Not so much in his opening remarks about how the west was making a dangerous world safer, but in his reply to Kemi Badenoch.The Tory leader just gets worse and worse. Half-witted, sulky and tone deaf. Kemikaze seemed to think the UK should no longer bother to send its prime minister to these international meetings. That Keir had only gone for the craic and to avoid her at prime minister’s questions. As if. Facing Kemi over the dispatch box was his half an hour of R&R in the week.Starmer dismissed her with barely concealed contempt as neither serious nor credible. An am-dram politician. Even the Tories were aghast. Mark Pritchard openly criticised his leader. He spoke for many on his own benches.Kemi had achieved the seemingly impossible. She had revivified a tired prime minister and united both Labour and opposition MPs against her. There is only one politician who looks a genuine leader in the Commons and it is still Starmer. He may have his hands full with a rebellion over the welfare bill, but as long as Kemi remains the leader of the opposition, he has nothing to fear from the Tories. More

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      Manzanar teaches about Japanese American incarceration in the US. That’s in jeopardy under Trump

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      At the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, more than 200 miles (320km) outside Los Angeles, in what feels like the middle of nowhere, is Manzanar national historic site. It marks the place where more than 10,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during the second world war, crowded into barracks, surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers with searchlights, and patrolled by military police.Since then, Manzanar, which now has a museum and reconstructed barracks that visitors can walk through, has been transformed into a popular pilgrimage destination for Japanese Americans to remember and teach others about this history. (Manzanar was one of 10 concentration camps where the US government forcibly relocated and held more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent during the second world war.)But recently, under the direction of the Trump administration, National Park Service (NPS) employees have hung new signs at Manzanar that historians and community advocates say will undermine these public education efforts. The notices encourage visitors to report “any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features” via a QR code. The signs, which have been posted at all national parks, monuments and historic sites, were displayed in support of Donald Trump’s executive order Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.Historians, national park advocates and community leaders say they’re alarmed by the move, in what they see as the most recent example of the Trump administration’s attempt to “whitewash” US history.View image in fullscreen“Any attempt to constrain or sanitize the stories that are told at Manzanar should concern every American,” said Naomi Ostwald Kawamura, executive director of Densho, an organization that documents the testimonies of Japanese Americans who were held in concentration camps. “I’m incredibly disappointed that this is happening in the United States because museums, monuments and memorials are public spaces where we can explore difficult history, confront our past, engage with what’s uncomfortable and then be able to imagine the future that we want to collectively share.”Earlier this year, government agencies compiled hundreds of words to be erased from federal recognition such as “diversity”, “cultural heritage”, “marginalized”, “racial inequality” and “ethnicity”.“I think the sign is clearly trying to create a chilling effect in the telling of these stories,” said Dennis Arguelles, the southern California director of the National Parks Conservation Association, which supports national parks and opposes planned changes to alter historical facts. “These are moments in our history and it’s very dangerous for us to try to pretend it didn’t happen.”The NPS, which has already been under pressure due to funding cuts, hiring freezes and forced resignations, has a legal mandate to preserve, protect and interpret American history. By posting the new signs across all 433 parks, monuments and historic sites, park visitors can act as government informants, although Arguelles said he has heard anecdotally that people have used the QR code to express support for Manzanar and ask that the administration let park rangers do their jobs.View image in fullscreenNPS units have been tasked with reviewing all “inappropriate content” on display by 18 July, and parks will receive direction about what to do with it by 18 August.Arguelles said that fears of public education at Manzanar being stifled are not unfounded. The park service has already stripped the contributions of transgender people from the Stonewall national monument’s website. And the US army deleted a webpage dedicated to the famed 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the nation’s most decorated military unit, which was composed of thousands of Japanese Americans whose families were forcibly incarcerated by their own government. After public outcry, the page was partially restored.The Trump administration has also threatened funding for colleges and universities offering ethnic studies programs as part of their DEI purge. Cultural institutions such as the Japanese American National Museum that focus on education, culture and storytelling have lost grants (some have since been temporarily restored). Among the cuts was a National Endowment for the Humanities grant that funded a workshop that helped teachers build a curriculum about the history of Japanese incarceration that benefitted roughly 20,000 students a year.“As a historian, you can see a pendulum swing between a very narrow and exclusive vision of America as a white Christian nation and a more open, multi-ethnic America,” said Duncan Ryūken Williams, director of the University of Southern California’s Shinso Ito Center and co-founder of of the Irei Project, which, for the first time, compiled the names of 125,284 people of Japanese ancestry who were unjustly incarcerated during the second world war. “We’re obviously in one part of that spectrum now.”The preservation of this part of Japanese American history is about more than remembering the past. In March, Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act – the very law that served as the basis for some of the arrests and roundups of Japanese Americans during the second world war – against Venezuelan nationals as young as 14 whom the administration claims are members of the Tren de Aragua gang. In cases challenging the executive order, every judge except one has found the Trump administration’s use of the act to deport people without due process to be illegal.When the US last invoked the Alien Enemies Act, it began a period of escalation that resulted in the supreme court deferring to unsubstantiated claims from the executive branch, which led to everyday people, two-thirds of whom were American citizens, losing their families, jobs, homes and freedoms. (It wasn’t just the Alien Enemies Act; most people of Japanese descent were detained, under the auspices of martial law in Hawaii and otherwise under Executive Order 9066.)Williams said that, like today, the way the Alien Enemies Act was used during the second world war was prejudicial since people of Japanese heritage were seen at the time as being “unassimilable racially and religiously”, recalling racist tropes from the era of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act.View image in fullscreen“Currently, we are seeing people being picked up and detained and moved immediately away from their families,” said Aarti Kohli, executive director of the Asian Law Caucus, one of 60 Asian American organizations that filed an amicus brief supporting the fight against Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act. “We’re hearing reports of even green card holders having been deported without any process, without a hearing. It’s really, really disturbing.”She connects the lack of due process many immigrants are experiencing today to what most Japanese Americans experienced during the second world war. “This is the same playbook,” Kohli said. “The government suppressed evidence and made false claims to justify incarceration in WWII and today’s administration is doing the same thing. They’re invoking this law with no evidence.”While it remains to be seen how the courts will rule on the Alien Enemies Act and how the NPS will handle complying with the administration’s orders about the content at sites like Manzanar, Japanese American community organizations are determined to teach the lessons of the past to show how quickly civil liberties can be taken away, particularly for communities of color.“The slogan Make America Great Again is sort of calling back to the past that didn’t exist,” said Densho’s Kawamura. “We’re going to do our best to protect and safeguard this history so that young people still have access to it even if the federal government itself is making it more difficult for us to do our work.” More

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      On r/collapse, people are ‘kept abreast of the latest doom’. Its moderators say it’s not for everyone

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      The threat of nuclear war, genocide in Gaza, ChatGPT reducing human cognitive ability, another summer of record heat. Every day brings a torrent of unimaginable horror. It used to be weeks between disasters, now we’re lucky to get hours.For many, the only sane solution is to stop reading the news altogether – advice often shared by therapists, self-help books and even newspaper articles.But to bury your head in the sand until the day the apocalypse arrives at your doorstep is not necessarily the most tranquil, nor moral, of postures. In the sprawling Reddit community r/collapse, people instead try to stare unblinkingly at the unravelling of civilization. For the roughly half a million members here, many of whom joined in the wake of Covid-19 pandemic and two Donald Trump inaugurations, the arc of history feels more like a freefall.This June, r/collapse was busy discussing the developing conflict between Iran and Israel, as well as “wet bulbs” (a far more humid and deadly type of heatwave), the millions of air conditioners being bought in India as temperatures rise and Trump’s plan to end Fema.But one of the top posts tackled a more specialist topic: declining levels of phytoplankton in the North Atlantic. “As if the North Atlantic fisheries wasn’t in bad enough shape from overfishing of cod, now the base of the entire food chain has observed to be getting smaller each year for the past 60 years,” the poster wrote. A commenter added: “Ocean acidification/die off is terrifying. Even if we solve all the other collapse problems (and we almost certainly can’t) the oceans dying means the atmosphere becomes depleted of oxygen and poisonous. If humans survive those scenarios, life on Earth would more resemble that of a moon colony.” Much informed panicking ensued.There are lots of places on the internet, and especially on Reddit, that collate news stories around a theme: r/UpliftingNews, r/LateStageCapitalism and r/nottheonion (which posts news so ridiculous it seems like satire) to name a few. But r/collapse is much more than a collation of links for people to feel outraged and nihilistic or warm and fuzzy about. What’s striking is the clear-eyed, unemotional tone in which posts are written: neither pessimistic nor hopeful, just peering through the window at a relentless decline.“We are not an activist subreddit,” one moderator, a retired history teacher, told me. “We filter out people who want to organize and protest. We are also not inclined towards accelerationism, we’re not seeking doom. We accept that perhaps it’s going to happen, but it’s not a conspiratorial subreddit. It’s basically logic, rational and scientific.”View image in fullscreenThat is thanks in part to r/collapse’s 30 fairly active moderators – among them neuroscientists, environmental scientists, chemical engineers, government auditors and history teachers – who intensively maintain the subreddit as relatively objective a resource as possible. They even have a separate page, called r/collapse_wilds, for posts removed by the moderation team, usually because they did not provide high quality enough evidence. When a new moderator applies, the existing group screens them for mental health issues and ability to handle consistently distressing content, as well as overt political bias.It might sound like a lot of red tape to help run a subreddit, but when you realize what it takes to drench yourself in fatalistic topics day in, day out, you start to understand that a collapse moderator is a special kind of person.I spoke with 10 such moderators on a video chat, just as the national guard and marines were sent to quell Ice protests in Los Angeles. All are men based in North America, polite and turn-taking, though most insisted on remaining anonymous so their online roles wouldn’t interfere with their real world positions. In their roles, they take the existential questions of civilization collapse seriously: What exactly constitutes collapse? Are we already experiencing it? Why aren’t people reacting more strongly to its likelihood, and does either humanity or technology have the ability to prevent it? Practical questions, too: where is the best place to live, the most helpful job to have, as collapse happens?They wrestle with whether too much Trump news is distracting, and painstakingly debate posts about the morality of having children and population growth, which they say is the most controversial topic among the community. Each post from a user must come with an accompanying statement explaining why it’s related to collapse that the moderators assess; sometimes it seems more like they’re overseeing a grant application process rather than an online forum.The work is often philosophical in nature. “People say that this is one of the least religious times in human history, but I think that’s completely false,” said Etienne, a moderator who is based in Ontario with a background in cognitive science and neuroscience. “Most of us have strong, strong faith in the myth of technological progress. Most people associate thinking about collapse with pessimism because you’re questioning the orthodoxy of our modern religion, which is faith in progress. And I think once you’ve made peace with the myth that we all grew up with being scientifically false, then you go through the stages of grief, then you build some psychological resilience to live in the world.”The group says that when the media or academia write about collapse issues, they often try to end on an optimistic note, so as not to depress the reader.“It’s really hard to find a mainstream publication that doesn’t end an article about, say, renewable energy, with a section that says: ‘things are difficult but let’s have hope’ and ‘it’s just a matter of building more solar panels,’” Etienne said. He cited reports, including an impactful study by Simon Michaux commissioned by the Finnish government, that say it’s simply impossible to replace energy with renewable sources at scale. “But we find there’s much less coverage of that – of using less energy and degrowth.”View image in fullscreenThe moderators also say that people who are concerned about societal collapse tend to think it’ll come suddenly with a nuclear bomb or terrible pandemic. The subreddit is of a different mind. One moderator, an engineer who preferred to remain anonymous, explained the tenets of r/collapse like this: “In the long term, it’s going to be very difficult for us to maintain this very complex industrial society. We’re looking at a type of simplification of industrial civilization. I think most of our members think this is what collapse is, which is why almost half of the members, when asked when they think collapse is going to happen, said that it’s already happening.“This is the idea of catabolic collapse: that what we’re living through is a series of crises, sometimes followed by momentary resolution, but the long-term trend is downturn. It’s not going to be a sudden event that’s everything in a single day, which I think people like preppers are more accustomed to thinking.”Every week, r/collapse puts out a special newsletter called Last Week in Collapse, a one-stop shop for everything that has gone wrong in the world. Its author is an international affairs researcher, who requested anonymity because their background might “color the reader’s interpretation of the events”. They’re not part of the moderation group, but began writing the roundup in 2021, inspired by what they had seen on the subreddit.“It was part of a process of making sense of the storm of news around us – almost a form of writing therapy,” they told me over email. “It is so easy to get lost or distracted by the next thing that we forget the big picture. So I decided to start organizing and summarizing other stories because I believed it would help other collapsologists and observers zoom out and take it all in.”It makes for a pretty brutal read. This week’s newsletter, for example, began with a newly published study of tree rings that suggested “irreversible large-scale forest loss” in the Amazon; featured a study saying climate change could reduce crop yields across the US and Europe 40% by 2100, which one scientist likened to “everyone on the planet giving up breakfast”; touched on counterintuitive research showing that some glass bottles contain up to 50 times more microplastics than plastic bottles or metal cans; and reported that this is “the sixth consecutive year that global peacefulness has deteriorated” per the Global Peace Index. These were just a few of around a hundred links.“Collapse is hard to deny when it’s all laid out for you every week,” says the author. Readers are now able to spend just five or 10 minutes reading one email “and be kept abreast on all the latest doom”.I ask what differentiates just bad news from a news story that is actually about collapse. “I have found that it helps to imagine likely realities for humanity, position your perspective in the future, and then look backwards for the telltale signs and milestones of future collapse,” the author says. “What factors and events will seem obvious to someone living 50 or 100 years from now? We can look back at the 1930s today and the road to WWII seems much clearer. Scientists are publishing under-appreciated studies every day, and their relevance is fairly obvious. Yet our attention lies elsewhere entirely.”A weekly roundup does seem like a useful alternative to completely ignoring society’s downfall. But if things are as bad as r/collapse believes them to be, does it do us any good to inundate ourselves with news of the end of everything? Aren’t we just increasing our personal suffering without making anything better?“Yes, I sometimes wonder about the overall mental impact of Last Week in Collapse,” says its author. “I know some people find it to be valuable, informative and even soothing. Others can’t bring themselves to read it. It’s not for everyone, and that’s fine. To paraphrase Trotsky: you may not be interested in collapse, but collapse is interested in you.”View image in fullscreenTo that end, the subreddit provides online mental health resources as well as a separate community, r/CollapseSupport, where people talk about their struggles. “Can’t stop thinking about the children”, “feeling completely hopeless” and “scared to death for everyone” are three recent post titles.Most of the moderators say that the thing they’ve found most helpful in dealing with the onslaught of information is moderating itself, and connecting with people who have similar concerns across the world: debating but also sharing cat photos and having meaningful discussion about how to lead a meaningful life in the end times. But they’re aware they’re not always the most fun people at a party.“I don’t want to be right about this sort of situation,” said one of the moderators, an electrical engineer from the midwest. “But if you’re open-minded and you’re considerate of sources, and you’re approaching it from a very methodical fashion, there is much cause for concern. Working through that grief was trying. I think there’s a lot of people that come to this community that maybe had my same perspective, and if I can at least help a few of those folks work through that, or come to their own peace, that adds some small iota of value to the internet space at large.”And that would be a vaguely uplifting note to end this article on, but as I’m hearing, that’s the coward’s way out. The truth is not all the people behind r/collapse feel like they’re necessarily helping.As the author of Last Week in Collapse put it to me, there’s probably no way out of the collapse: “I do not believe we will ultimately innovate or vote ourselves out of our situation. I predict humanity is in for a polluted future of climate emergencies, famines, wars and scarcity before the end of this century. And heatwaves, civil conflicts, breakdown of ocean currents, disease, poverty, overpopulation, drought and more. So I feel a certain sense of duty to inform those who are interested, but it’s probably healthier to ‘chop wood, carry water’ than to spend too much time following the world’s problems. Most people can’t really stop the machine anyway.” More

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      Zohran Mamdani has unleashed a political earthquake | Ben Davis

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      The surprise electoral success of Zohran Mamdani, the 33-year-old democratic socialist running to be mayor of New York, the most prominent city on earth, is a political earthquake. The breadth and scope of his performance were predicted by no polls, no prognosticators, none of the wise men. The ramifications of this upset will be felt for years, across the US and the developed world.In the end, it wasn’t even close. Mamdani’s widespread appeal represents the total collapse of a Democratic party establishment that had weathered Donald Trump’s first term with rhetorical resistance, and fumbled the beginning of the second with triangulating appeasement. This year, the favorability of the Democratic party has collapsed to record lows, not because of the popularity of the Trump administration or the Republican party, but because of its unpopularity with its own voters. Chuck Schumer caving to the president on an unpopular and devastating Republican spending bill was the last straw for many. The Democratic party and the resistance to Trump had been severed for the first time.There’s anger across the country with its leadership, Democratic and Republican, in cities, suburbs and rural areas. According to Americans, things are not going well. Prices are up, wages are down and instability is at an all-time high. Nowhere is this more true than in our biggest city, New York, where the moderate Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, made a quid pro quo deal to keep himself out of prison on corruption charges in exchange for enforcing Trump’s policies in a city where Trump had minimal political support.Enter Mamdani. Many major cities in the US, in recent years, had a two-party system, not between Democrats and Republicans, but between centrist Democrats and their progressive flank. The US, like all polities, has many organized political groupings, but due to byzantine electoral laws, only two official ones exist – the state-administered ballot lines. Nowhere is this more true than in New York, the crown jewel of the electoral socialist left in the United States for more than a century.Mamdani is the progeny of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the US’s largest socialist organization in a century. He is among the many young people inspired by Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. The staying power of that campaign has asserted itself over the years. Most of the talented organizers and thinkers whom it shaped were in college or their early 20s. They were never going to stop being socialists. They just needed seasoning.Mamdani got involved in the DSA as a young man and honed his skills leading campaigns in the nearly all-volunteer organization. He has spent most of his adult life as a DSA organizer. After the New York City DSA had built sufficient infrastructure and he had learned the necessary skills, he was able to win election to the state assembly in 2020. But to Mamdani, democratic socialism isn’t an identity or a set of principles. It is being part of and accountable to a democratic organization, the sort of working-class civil society that has atrophied in this country, but at one time built the backbone of the welfare state across western society and lent the muscle to the New Deal.Mamdani and the DSA cannot be separated. It’s a different, and for many Americans new, but a deeply old way of thinking about politics. Political organizations represent different classes, which are necessarily in conflict. To win for your class, you must be a representative of working-class democracy.Mamdani was built by the DSA and the young leftwing milieu that emerged after the Sanders campaign. They cannot be separated. Not his charisma or campaign style. He is a product of the movement.His victory and its comprehensive level are shocking to nearly all. How did he do it? Combining new and old tactics. Mamdani had perhaps the most innovative social media campaign in American political history. Not jumping on tired memes, but showcasing his authenticity. He also borrowed old tactics. Mamdani harnessed the sort of retail diaspora politics that have always won in the world’s most diverse city. He campaigned in dozens of languages, met leaders from ethnic groups from around the world and sold his vision in the style of Fiorello LaGuardia. This way, he was able to harness both the insurgent left, often caricatured as downwardly mobile, overly educated and overwhelmingly white, and the worldwide working-class diaspora that shapes the neighborhoods of New York.As he climbed the polls through steady mass organization, almost linearly, he began to face ever-increasing, and horrifying, attacks from capital and the powers that be, to the tune of a record $25m in outside spending. The one they homed in on was one that had been proven to take down leftwing leaders across the world, such as Jeremy Corbyn: antisemitism. All social justice-minded people are horrified by antisemitism, an ancient hatred. It’s an accusation that would make anyone on the left, anyone of conscience, take notice. For this reason, used in a spurious way, it was an insidious attack that could break the left. However, in this election, the baseless smear backfired.There are several reasons for this. The first is overuse. It’s quite blatant to continually accuse obviously deeply compassionate and humanistic people of an evil hatred without evidence. No one believes friendly and understanding social democrats in a secular urban milieu are pogromists or jihadists (despite nasty Islamophobic baiting about Mamdani’s background), for obvious reasons.The second is the actual circumstances. Most accusations of antisemitism on the left have little or nothing to do with actual overt discrimination or hatred; they are almost entirely based on opinion of the state of Israel. As Israel continues its genocide of Palestinians and long-term eliminationist and revanchist ambitions, and ties itself closer to the far right in the US, Democratic voters in the US have made the rapid and historic transition to sympathizing with Palestinians over Israel by a nearly 3-1 margin. Even last year, this issue and money could win Democratic primaries. No longer.Lastly, Mamdani is in many ways a continuation of the Jewish left tradition in the United States. New York has long been the home of the most powerful electoral socialist left in the United States. The base for the Socialist party of America (SPA) or the American Labor party, many-time electoral winners, was the Jewish community. Jews in New York voted in the hundreds of thousands for socialists for decades. These are the same policies of so-called “sewer socialism” (in which socialists ran cities like Milwaukee and boasted of excellent sewer systems), the same parties (DSA being the direct inheritor of the SPA), the same tradition and even the same neighborhoods as a century ago. The foundation of the American left. An unbroken line. Mamdani is the inheritor of the tradition of Baruch Vladeck, and of the socialists and trade unions that built New York. Even the membership of DSA and the staff of his campaign reflect this.So, how did Mamdani win support? He brought back class as the defining issue of politics. Class as a political divide has declined across the industrialized world for decades, beginning in the US. While Sanders reinjected a class message and a degree of class polarization back within the Democratic coalition, there were still shortcomings. Bernie did worse among Black voters across class. And Bernie and other democratic socialists relied heavily on the good graces of socially progressive upper-middle-class professionals, rendering socialists subordinate to or in coalition with their interests and organizations. After nearly a decade of work by the left, this class polarization seemed uncrackable. Until now.Mamdani underachieved compared with prior leftwing candidates in professional progressive areas like the Upper West Side. But he smashed through the racial barrier that had divided the working class. Few expected this before the votes rolled in. His base would be downwardly mobile white professionals, of course. But his clear message and innovative campaign brought back real class politics, of the kind that seemed a myth in the contemporary age.According to the New York Times, Mamdani did better with voters of color than with white voters. While he shed reliably progressive votes among the Times-reading, machine-hating liberals of Manhattan, he won them back many times over among working-class people of color who had never taken a second look at leftist candidates before. In this, he reversed nearly 30 years of anti-materialist political science theories.This may seem like something confined to New York City, a progressive bastion in a deep blue state. But it points a path forward for the left and for advocates of social justice and liberatory politics. Donald Trump’s most shocking and profound gains in 2024 came among young voters, particularly men, Latino voters, Asian voters and urban voters in general. These are the exact demographics that came out in droves for Mamdani.The left has long shirked its responsibility to fight the far right, leaving it to the center as if the political spectrum were a rigorously enforced line rather than a fluid concept. But the center failed. And they sacrificed these demographics to Trump because these masses were fed up with the status quo. The center could never win them back. But the radical left actually could, through a targeted, economic, anti-establishment message. Mamdani’s campaign did it, and brought people back from the far right on a massive scale, more than any anti-Trump rally could. In this way, campaigns like Mamdani’s are actively practicing anti-fascism in a real way, by winning the targets of the right back to the left.The left needs to study this shocking election and take thorough notes. The first is that Mamdani was a product of real, organic, working-class organization in the DSA. The kind that has been dying out in this country for half a century and is disregarded by most. This lack of organization is the defining feature of our political time. The only way to the future is more people in the DSA, more people in unions, more people in civic organizations and the rebuilding of working-class community. Our institutions are hollow, but Mamdani and his 50,000 youthful volunteers are proof that they can be rebuilt, and that people yearn to do so.In 2017, a DSA organizer and philosopher named Michael Kinnucan said: “US civic culture is so hollowed out at the grassroots level that in any city in the US if your organization can get 40 to 50 committed people in a room occasionally you’re probably operating one of the five or six most potentially powerful grassroots organizations in your city.”This idea was foundational to DSA, especially in New York City, and shaped Mamdani. For many, it seemed a fantasy. Five hundred thousand votes later, across nearly every language and nationality in the world, it’s a warning. To defeat the right, the left must learn from Mamdani and the DSA and rebuild mass working-class organization. Sure, charisma helps, but at its core, this win was an eight-year project that must be replicated everywhere if we are to defeat fascism and stop the worst horrors of the climate crisis. Mamdani is an Obama-level political talent, but most of all he is a call to return to real working-class organization. This is something the hollow entities of the Democratic or Republican parties could never defeat, and something they learned on Tuesday night.

      Ben Davis works in political data in Washington DC. He worked on the data team for the Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign More

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      Senators to meet security officials amid questions over Trump’s decision to attack Iran – US politics live

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      Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog. My name is Tom Ambrose and I will be bringing you all the latest news lines.Senators are set to meet with top national security officials Thursday as many question president Donald Trump’s decision to bomb three Iranian nuclear sites — and whether those strikes were ultimately successful.The classified briefing, which was originally scheduled for Tuesday and was delayed, also comes as the Senate is expected to vote this week on a resolution that would require congressional approval if Trump decides to strike Iran again, AP reported.Democrats, and some Republicans, have said that the White House overstepped its authority when it failed to seek the advice of Congress and they want to know more about the intelligence that Trump relied on when he authorized the attacks.“Senators deserve full transparency, and the administration has a legal obligation to inform Congress precisely about what is happening,” said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, who said Tuesday that it was “outrageous” that the Senate and House briefings were postponed. A similar briefing for House members was pushed to Friday.CIA director John Ratcliffe, secretary of state Marco Rubio and defense secretary Pete Hegseth are expected to brief the senators on Thursday. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard was scheduled to be at the Tuesday briefing, but will not be attending, according to a person familiar with the schedule.In other news:

      Trump weighed in on Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York, saying Mamdani was a “100% Communist Lunatic” and saying he and other progressive politicians were signs that “our Country is really SCREWED”.

      Trump has lit into journalists who are reporting on the doubts in the intelligence community that the US bombs actually decimated the Iranian nuclear sites. He has called for a CNN journalist to be fired over her reporting. CNN defended its journalist, Natasha Bertrand, and its stories on the matter.

      Emil Bove, a judicial nominee and justice department official, was grilled by a Senate committee and denied allegations in a whistleblower report about ignoring judicial orders and said claims of a quid pro quo for New York City mayor Eric Adams were false.

      Speaking of Eric Adams, he is expected to formally announce his mayoral run tomorrow. He is running as an independent. And he went on Fox and called Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee for mayor, a “snake oil salesman”.

      Mamdani, meanwhile, gathered congratulations (sometimes muted) from prominent Democrats after his upset win in the mayoral primary. On the right, Stephen Miller has cast Mamdani’s win as a symptom of “unchecked migration”.

      The Working Families Party called Mamdani’s win a “seismic shift” and shows that “voters are thoroughly fed up with the status quo”.

      Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr’s new vaccine advisory panel is meeting today for the first time. More

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      Trump officials cite ‘new intelligence’ to back president’s claims of success in strikes on Iran

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      Donald Trump’s administration ratcheted up its defence of the US’s weekend attacks on Iran, citing “new intelligence” to support its initial claim of complete success and criticising a leaked intelligence assessment that suggested Tehran’s nuclear programme had been set back by only a few months.The growing row came amid reports that the White House will to try to limit the sharing of classified documents with Congress, according to the Washington Post and the Associated Press.“This was a devastating attack, and it knocked them for a loop,” Trump said on Wednesday, apparently backing away from comments he’d made earlier in the day, that the intelligence was “inconclusive”.Senior Trump officials publicly rejected the leaked initial assessment of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) which concluded key components of the nuclear programme were capable of being restarted within months. Director of national intelligence Tulsi Gabbard said in a post on X that “new intelligence confirms” what Trump has stated.“Iran’s nuclear facilities have been destroyed. If the Iranians chose to rebuild, they would have to rebuild all three facilities (Natanz, Fordow, Esfahan) entirely, which would likely take years to do,” she said.CIA director John Ratcliffe in a statement said that new intelligence from a “historically reliable” source indicated that “several key Iranian nuclear facilities were destroyed and would have to be rebuilt over the course of years.”During a news conference at the Nato summit, Trump briefly ceded the stage to defence secretary Pete Hegseth, who lashed out at the media and claimed reporters were using the leaked intelligence assessment to politically damage Trump. “They want to spin it to try to make him look bad,” he said.In the wake of the leaked DIA report, the White House will reportedly to try to limit the sharing of classified documents with Congress, a senior official told the Associated Press.Democratic Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer criticised the reported decision to limit information sharing, saying “senators deserve information, and the administration has a legal obligation to inform Congress precisely about what is happening right now abroad”.Classified briefings for lawmakers had been scheduled to take place on Tuesday, but were postponed, prompting outrage from members of Congress. The briefings are now expected to take place on Thursday and Friday.The leaked DIA assessment also found that much of Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium, which would provide the fuel for making any future nuclear warhead, had been moved before the strikes and may have been moved to other secret nuclear sites maintained by Iran. That claim was backed up by the UN nuclear watchdog – the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – which said it lost “visibility” of the material when “hostilities began”.However, in an interview with French television, IAEA director-general Rafael Grossi said: “I don’t want to give the impression that it’s been lost or hidden.”View image in fullscreenOn Wednesday, the White House pushed back on those claims, with press secretary Karoline Leavitt telling Fox News the US had “no indication that that enriched uranium was moved prior to the strikes, as I also saw falsely reported”.“As for what’s on the ground right now, it’s buried under miles and miles of rubble because of the success of these strikes on Saturday evening,” she said.The US military said it dropped 14 GBU-57 bunker-buster bombs – powerful 13,600kg (30,000lb) weapons – on three Iranian nuclear sites. Since the attacks, Trump has repeatedly claimed that the sites were “obliterated”.The White House highlighted an Israeli statement that Iran’s nuclear efforts were delayed by years, while a spokesperson for the Iranian foreign ministry also said the facilities have suffered significant damage.On Wednesday evening, Trump said that Hegseth – whom he dubbed “war” secretary – would hold a news conference at 8am EST on Thursday to “fight for the dignity of our great American pilots”, referring to the pilots of the B2 bombers that carried out the strikes. He said that “these patriots were very upset” by “fake news” reports about the limited impact of the strikes.As the row grew over how much the strikes set back Tehran’s nuclear programme, diplomatic efforts to prevent Iran from rebuilding the programme also gathered pace.Trump said US and Iranian officials would meet soon, resuming a dialogue that was interrupted by the nearly two week war, even as he suggested that negotiations were no longer necessary.
      “I don’t care if I have an agreement or not,” Trump said, because Iran was too badly damaged to even consider rebuilding its programme. “They’re not going to be doing it anyway. They’ve had it.”View image in fullscreenThe IAEA has rejected an “hourglass approach” involving different assessments of how many months or years it would take Iran to rebuild, saying it distracts from finding a long-term solution to an issue that had not been resolved.“In any case, the technological knowledge is there and the industrial capacity is there. That, no one can deny. So we need to work together with them,” Grossi said, adding that his priority was the return of IAEA inspectors to the nuclear sites, the only way he said they could be properly assessed.Meanwhile, Iranian authorities are pivoting from their ceasefire with Israel to intensifying an internal security crackdown across the country with mass arrests, executions and military deployments, according to officials and activists.Iran’s intelligence services have arrested 26 people, accusing them of collaborating with Israel, state media Fars news agency reported.Some in Israel and exiled opposition groups had hoped the 12-day military campaign, which targeted Revolutionary Guards and internal security forces as well as nuclear sites, would spark a mass uprising and the overthrow of the Islamic Republic.While numerous Iranians expressed anger at the government, there has been no sign yet of any significant protests against the authorities.With the Associated Press and Reuters More